HSBC is still in the middle of a cyber attack

This is how the HSBC's UK online banking site looked for much of the afternoon.
Screenshot HSBC
HSBC's is still in the middle of a cyber, more five hours after it was first reported that its online banking system had gone down for the second time in less than a month, following a cyber attack on the bank.

Having been completely down until around 4:45 p.m. GMT, HSBC has now restored some of its online banking operations

A statement emailed to Business Insider by HSBC said:

HSBC's internet and mobile services have partially recovered, and we continue to work to restore a full service.

We are continuing to experience attempted denial of service attacks and we are closely monitoring the situation with the authorities.

We apologise for the disruption and inconvenience this may have caused.

An earlier statement from the bank, sent early afternoon, said:

HSBC internet banking came under a denial of service attack this morning, which affected personal banking websites in the UK.

HSBC has successfully defended against the attack, and customer transactions were not affected. We are working hard to restore normal service.

HSBC is working closely with law enforcement authorities to pursue the criminals responsible for today's attack on our internet banking.

We apologise for any inconvenience this incident may have caused.

For around four hours, customers currently trying to log onto HSBC's site were met with a message saying:

"We'd like to apologise to all our customers for Online Banking being unavailable. We know how inconvenient this is and we are doing everything we can to rectify the problem. Please try later."

The bank says it was hit by a denial of service, also known as a DDoS, attack. This method of attack basically floods a website with traffic from multiple systems, overloading servers and causing the site to crash. It is the same method used against the BBC website on New Year's Eve.

This is the second time in just over three weeks that HSBC's online systems have gone down. On January 4th, HSBC's internet banking service went down for the first time, in an outage that spread across two days. The crash led to Britain's banking regulator, the Financial Conductor Authority, to scrutinise HSBC.

At the time a spokesperson told Business Insider: "The FCA is in contact with HSBC regarding a recent IT issue. We will be working closely with the bank as it resolves the problem and to ensure there are steps in place to help consumers who are affected."